John Whiting

I've checked it sufficiently to determine, for instance, that it relies heavily on ketosis, which results from dietary deficiencies of carbohydrate. At least one food writer of my acquaintance painfully and expensively lost a kidney as a result of it. Barry Groves' low carb diet avoids ketosis and allows -- indeed recommends -- up to 60 grams of carbohydrate per day (a couple of slices of bread, for example). Weight loss is in the region of a pound or two a week; more he considers to be excessive. I'm not against low carb diets per se; in fact I followed Barry's diet for three months last year and lost twenty pounds eating the foods I love most. But in the case of, for instance, low-carb bread, my observation has told me that in the long run people who eat imitations of the foods they want to avoid find them to be temptations back to the originals. One food writer I admire calls them culinary porn.

There is an intelligent and moderate version of the low carb diet, originated in the 19th century by William Banting and explained in an award-winning essay delivered by Dr. Barry Groves at last year's Oxford Food Symposium: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/banting.html But of course all the media attention goes to the widely hyped Atkins diet which takes off the pounds at an unhealthy rate by cutting out fruits and vegetables with their essential nutrients (and then selling dietary supplements at an inflated price). What the food industry is now going after is weak-willed dieters-in-a-hurry who want the same old junk food with its ingredients magically transformed. They're like the vegetarians who gobble up ersatz burgers and sausages.

The failure of government to govern is due, not to inherent defects in the fact of government, but to deeper defects in the human psyche. These manifest themselves even more clearly in unregulated commerce. If you want a model of what ungovered human behavior produces, take a look at internet spam and pornography. One capitalises [literally] on greed, the other on salacity.

Thanks, Nick, I thought the printer-friendly page was freely available.

And in particular, how likely that they would take the punters to where they were shovelling odds and ends into the hamburger machine?

In today's NYT, Eric Schlosser documents the fact that the US laissez-faire management of its meat supply, followed by its equivocal response to its proven failure, is a recapitulation of the chain of events in every country which has already gone through this sorry sequence of events. Would we allow the National Association of Burglers to write the laws governing their own activities, on the grounds that "the market knows best"? http://query.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntg...print&position=

Alas, Not. EDIT: But a large pottery mixing bowl -- the traditional sort that's white on the inside and biege on the outside with a molded decorative pattern -- is of almost exactly the same proportions, though with slightly curved rather than straight sides. They're cheap, and the largest size is almost exactly the same capacity as the Not's largest cassole. Since the inside of the cassole is glazed, the glazing on the outside of the mixing bowl is not significant -- neither of them "breathe". I bought one to make an impromptu cassoulet in the north of Scotland with locally available ordinary ingredients and found, as I expected, this this is the sort of dish in which process is more important than precise ingredients.

We sought out the Hotel where the Grande Confrérie was photographed for Saveur. I do not recommend the experience. This is our record of it:

Artifical food coloring featured on the cover of Gourmet is the back of beyond. When such a magazine ricochets violently from one sort of puplic persona to another, I want to know what orders the owners have been giving the editors. Many editors have taken to concealing their serious content somewhere in the back pages, hoping that their loyal readers will still find it but that it will escape the notice of their illiterate publishers.

Georgia LacLeod Sales and Grover Sales, _The [Etruscan] Clay-Pot Cookbook_, Atheneum, 1974 is regularly available through ABE. Cassoles are still made in large quantities by the Not family in Mas-Saintes-Puelles. They supply almost all the local restaurants which serve cassoulet, and so breakage keeps them well supplied with replacement orders. They were featured in the Saveur article on cassoulet in the Jan/Feb 1998 issue. My wife and I went there a couple of years later and recorded our visit:

As Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University [London] pointed out on the BBC Today programme, The US government statements thus far could have been taken straight from the file of British press releases at the beginning of Britain's last BSE outbreak.

It's still a fine book, from which one may learn how to travel, how to eat and how to write. It's worth going to ABE for an original hardback edition, of which they list half a dozen under $20 -- not only because the paper edition soon falls to bits, but because the book has a fine look and a fine feel and is full of glorious well reproduced black and white photos.

Exactly. We now take our models of evaluation from those areas where there are indeed clear winners, such as competitive sport, law, gambling, gunfights, first-past-the-post elections and takeover bids. (The Coalition of the Willing have demonstrated to this generation that war no longer falls into that category.)

The most generously financed research projects are those whose unspoken object is to find ways of avoiding BSE while allowing intensive mass-production farming to continue. No instances of BSE-infected cattle have occurred on sustainably run farms with isolated livestock, and it's sophistry to suggest that this is just because the sample isn't large enough.

Jeffrey, the easy eloquence of your answers is a pleasure in itself! One skill required of both lawyers and foodwriters is the ability to wholeheartedly adopt a set of premises as though they were self-evident. Gastronomic relativism leads to standards which are so personal as to be anarchic.

The problem is that even as expensive a solution as sustainable agriculture would be cheaper in the long run [cf the British disaster]. But our government finances are conditioned by stockbroker economics, in which money travels so rapidly from investment to investment that only short-term projections are necessary. Look at present US government budgets and then figure how likely are any BSE-related policies which are calculated any further ahead than the next election.

My personal response to such dietary threats is conditioned by the ratio between my age and the period of incubation. And there are certain advantages to being past the age of reproduction. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, we are told, takes years to reveal itself. Bring on the steak tartare. What other terrors are waiting in the wings? No matter; long before they shuffle onstage, I will have succumbed to the one ailment for which science, thank heavens, has yet to discover a remedy. http://www.whitings-writings.com/essays/mad.htm

Two recent news items are ominously relevant: Six weeks ago, Dr. Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prions, warned Ms. Veneman of the USDA that what happened in Canada was going to happen in the United States. Dr. Prusiner said, "I told her it was just a matter of time." The department had been willfully blind to the threat, he said. The only reason mad cow disease had not been found here, he said, is that the department's animal inspection agency was testing too few animals. Once more cows are tested, he added, "we'll be able to understand the magnitude of our problem." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/25/national...print&position= UPI has been requesting documentation on BSE testing since July 10th and has been consistently fobbed off. Even after a threat of legal action under Freedom of Information laws, the USDA has not said if any records exist or if they will be sent to UPI. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20031223-103657-3424r

As a beef connoisseur, I'm not in a class with Fat Guy, but to my naive palate, I've never eaten a better steak than the locally grown product I had at Caesar's in Calgary. EDIT: No irony intended in my reference to Steven.

Amen!

Of course, the factor not controlled in those days was what meat had been through the grinder just before yours.

Animal welfare doesn't seem to be even a small factor in your equation. For instance, the BST hormonal treatment that mass-production dairy cows are routinely subjected to makes their lives a total misery. One doesn't have to be an animal rights freak to feel a strong revulsion at virtually universal practices which are, in effect, sadistic.

Well, that's a relief!

But it's still perfectly legal by proxy. You can feed cow remains to chickens and then feed chicken remains back to cows. The prions seem to be happy with whatever host offers them hospitality. EDIT: I note that jcsaucey has already mentioned this.

I wrote (and experienced) this in 1996, on tour through Normandy: